1. Field
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to an image forming apparatus, a method for controlling an image forming apparatus, and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, storage devices are mounted on image forming apparatuses to realize a local storage function for storing a program, and allowing read image data to be stored, edited, printed, and browsed from a network. Further, in recent years, there has been also realized a remote storage function of allowing even image data shared with a storage connected via a network to be browsed, stored, edited, and printed in a similar manner to the local storage.
When a user scans and stores an image, the user selectively uses the above-described local storage and the above-described remote storage according to his/her purpose by choosing one of them before starting a job. Further, in recent years, a cloud storage service, which allows a large-capacity storage to be used in a network, has been widely provided, and use of such a large-capacity storage has been increasingly demanded compared with the local storage that has only a limited capacity and backup volume.
On the other hand, together with an extremely high demand for assuring security of data and protecting privacy, the image forming apparatuses are also requested to have a capability to completely delete image data and preference data recorded in the storages.
For example, regarding hard disks (hereinafter referred to as HDDs), some image forming apparatuses are configured to overwrite a region where deletion target data is stored, with dummy data a plurality of times for the purpose of removing remaining magnetism, thereby preventing the deleted data from being restored (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-153516).
However, use of the remote storage leads to the necessity of checking every time whether a scanned document does not contain a highly confidential page like a document that should not be presented to anyone outside the company, and whether the storage destination is a safe storage. Therefore, a workload on users may increase.
Further, according to the conventional techniques, the data overwriting deletion processing can effectively work for data stored in the local storage. However, when the remote storage is used, this processing only works when image data is moved to the remote storage, and does not work after that.
For example, placing a highly confidential document in the remote storage occurs by mistake and incurs a risk of an information leak. Once the document is placed in the remote storage, even if the file is deleted after noticing the mistake, the risk of the information leak cannot be reduced because the data overwriting deletion processing is not performed, so that a possibility of restoration of the image data exists.